Farheen Haq and Russna Kaur reflect on transformation in their distinct yet interconnected practices. Their works engage with memory and language as something carried, inherited, and continually remade.

Haq’s time-based works in video, installation, performance, and photography remember and reimagine her South Asian Muslim Canadian female identity through the body and lived experience. Her new works focus on the teachings of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (a confluence of communal harmony and cultural respect in the areas around the Ganga and Jamuni rivers in northern India). Haq says these teachings can be applied to settler-Indigenous relationships on Turtle Island through culture making and ceremony.

Kaur’s expansive, multi-surface paintings unfold as living landscapes of recollection where colour, texture, and form trace personal, emotional, and intergenerational South Asian histories. Layer by layer, each work holds moments of recalling and losing, revealing memory not as something fixed but as continually carried, reshaped, and transformed.

This exhibit grows from two works in the permanent collection: Haq’s brick and video installation Revelation #2 and Kaur’s abstract painting Nice Ending. Added to these are new and loaned works where memory is embedded within materials and passed through gestures of mark-making. Threading the visual languages of embroidery, fabric, and painting, the artists reveal that textiles and texts are not simply objects but vessels of knowledge, care, and resilience.